Paint Schoodic

Wednesday, October 8, 2014

Dance of Death

The Triumph of Death, c.
1562, Pieter Bruegel the Elder

I admit that I’m fascinated by pandemics, and am morbidly
curious to see how the Ebola epidemic works its way through the First World.

Doktor Schnabel von Rom, engraving
by Paul Fürst, 1656. Plague doctors were hired by towns to control epidemic.
Some wore a beak-like mask which was filled with aromatic herbs designed to
prevent the spread of disease through “miasma” or putrid air.

The mother of all pandemics was the Black Death, which peaked
in Europe in 1346–53. It killed between
75 and 200 million people at a time when the world’s population was only 450
million people. (Amazingly, it wasn’t until a few years ago that the pathogen
responsible for it—the Yersinia pestis
bacterium—was definitively identified.)

The Triumph of Death, c.
1446, fresco, Palazzo Abatellis, Palermo

Originating in the plains of central Asia—the ‘Stans’—it traveled
down the Silk Road to the Crimea. From there, it was carried into Europe by
fleas on the rats on merchant ships. It is estimated to have killed 30-60% of
Europe’s population.

Knight, Death and the Devil, 1513, engraving by Albrecht Dürer

The plague returned repeatedly in Europe through the 14th
to 17th centuries. It came to the United States as part of a 19th
century pandemic that started in China. It is still active today, although
treatable with antibiotics; each year a dozen or so Americans are diagnosed with
it. Rather more worrisome, a drug-resistant form of the disease was found in
Africa in the 1990s.

Murder of Archbishop Ambrosius in the Moscow Plague Riot of
1771, engraving by Charles Michel
Geoffroy, 1845. The Archbishop had attempted to prevent citizens from gathering
at the Icon of the Virgin Mary of Bogolyubovo in Kitaigorod as
a quarantine measure.

The plague caused great social upheaval in Europe. Those with
means left their urban homes and shut themselves off from the world—the first
recorded ‘survivalists’. The dead received perfunctory attention, since their
corpses were dangerous. Faith was bifurcated: some abandoned it in an ‘eat,
drink and be merry’ hedonism, while others became more frenzied. Local and global trade was frozen, resulting
in shortages and spiraling inflation. On the other hand, the sudden, extreme shortage
of laborers led to the end of the manorial system of serfdom and the beginning
of a wage-based economy in Europe.

Danse Macabre, Bernt Notke, end of the 15th century, St. Nicholas' Church, Tallinn, Estonia. The Danse Macabre is a medieval art genre which tells us that—no matter our station in life—Death unites us all.

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